The rising number of foreign workers in Italy during the last 15 years has led to a conspicuous increase in the amount of remittances sent abroad. In this paper, we examine the determinants of remittance outflows originated in Italy and transferred abroad through registered financial intermediaries. After controlling for a wide set of socioeconomic regressors, we document a strong positive relation between remittances and the cost of travel between Italy and the migrants' respective home countries. We interpret this result as indirect evidence of unrecorded flows, since the relation between remittances and travel cost should be non‐significant unless geographical proximity permits remitters to switch to informal (non‐observable) transmission mechanisms. Moreover, using data on temporal and monetary costs for a subset of bilateral corridors, we also find remittances to be negatively correlated with high transaction costs and low speed of transfer. We rely on this empirical evidence and on a model of migrants' remitting behavior to present new strategies for estimating the size of the informal outflow.

A fast and accurate measurement of soil carbon is needed in current scientific issues. Today there are many sensors suitable for these purposes, but choosing the appropriate sensor depends on the spatial scale at which the studies are conducted. There are few detailed studies that validate these types of measures allowing their immediate use. Here it is validated the quick use of a sensor in execution at Pantelleria, chosen for size, use and variability of the parameter measured, to give an operational tool for carbon stocks studies. The DRIFT sensor used here has been validated in the first 60 cm of the soil of the whole island, and it has shown predictivity higher than 90%.

Variation of soil carbon stocks during the renaturation of old fields: the case study of the Pantelleria Island, Italy. The recent abandonment of marginal agricultural areas in the Mediterranean has caused an increase of the surface occupied by pre-forest and forest formations. In order to study the carbon accumulation processes on Pantelleria Island was selected a North-facing area. This area includes 5 stages of succession (sds) that compose a chronosequence (from 0 to 30 years) to understand soil C accumulation processes after abandon-ment. These are abandoned vineyards or caperbushes, not disturbed (grazing, fire) since agricultural aban-donment, and they are situated in thermomediterranean belt and on the same parent material and consequently considered in the same ecological conditions. Samples at 1 cm, 10 cm and 40 cm depth, respectively, were taken for every sds in three different soil relief areas. Litter samples were taken too. Organic carbon content was determined for every sample. Carbon content increases from a sds to the next one. There is a duplication of C from sds0 (cultivated field) to sd1 (abandoned since few years) and from sds4 (abandoned since 16-30 years) to sds5 (abandoned since > 30 years). It seems that different types of vegetation play a key-role in soil C dynamics and there are 85 t C ha-1 in the top 40 cm of the soil after 30 years from the abandon-ment in the chronosequence and an annual C sequestration rate equal to 3.4 t ha-1. These results show that re-vegetation offers good opportunities to sequestrate CO 2 from the atmosphere and, therefore, to mitigate the greenhouse effect as it is requested by international agreements. Citation: La Mantia T, Oddo G, Rühl J, Furnari G, Scalenghe R, 2007. Variazione degli stock di carbonio in seguito ai processi di abbandono dei coltivi: il caso studio dell'isola di Pantelleria (TP). Forest@ 4 (1): 102-109. [online] URL: http://www.sisef.it/. Premessa La riserva di carbonio (C) non è "statica" ma "dina-mica": il suolo può funzionare sia da "source" sia da "sink"; il C totale evidenzia la risposta ai cambiamen-ti del clima, della vegetazione e al tempo che inter-corre tra la fissazione del C dalle piante e il rilascio nell'atmosfera. La stima del carbonio fissato e della capacità di assorbimento nelle formazioni vegetali ha assunto, anche in dipendenza degli accordi interna-zionali sottoscritti dall'Italia, un crescente interesse ed è oggi una delle priorità della ricerca (Magnani & Borghetti 1998, Borghetti et al. 2001). In particolare, la quantificazione del carbonio trattenuto dalla vege-tazione mediterranea è difficile, a causa dell'alta ete-rogeneità delle formazioni anzidette ma anche per la mancanza di dati sulle specie che le compongono nonché di dati inventariali (Costa & La Mantia 2005). Una maggiore capacità di stimare il contributo delle formazioni mediterranee, soprattutto arbustive, di-venta necessario in presenza di un forte processo di abbandono dei coltivi in vaste aree marginali del Mediterraneo (Bonet 2004). Alle quantità di...

This paper analyses the response to the COVID‐19 pandemic of inbound tourism to Italy looking at variation across countries and provinces. To this end, it uses weekly data on the number of foreign visitors in Italy from January 2019 until February 2021, as provided by a primary mobile telephony operator. We document a very robust negative relation at the province level between the local epidemic situation and the inflow of foreign travellers. Moreover, provinces with a historically higher share in art‐tourism, and those that used to be ‘hotel intensive’ were hit the most during the pandemic, while provinces with a more prevalent orientation to business tourism proved to be more resilient. Entry restrictions with varying degrees of strictness played a key role in explaining cross‐country patterns. After controlling for these restrictions, we observed that the number of travellers that could arrive by private means of transportation decreased proportionally less. Overall, this evidence emphasises that contagion risk considerations played a significant role in shaping international tourism patterns during the pandemic.

This paper provides new Bank of Italy indicators of price competitiveness for 62 countries. We refreshed the approach adopted by the Bank in the 1990s but later discontinued in 2005 due to the cumbersome statistical requirements in order to accommodate the significant extension of the original geographical coverage. Thanks to progress made in data availability, we were able to update the weighting system to 2009-11 and take into account competitive pressures from local producers in all the outlet markets while keeping the same vast geographical coverage. The new indicators show that the developments in price competitiveness since 1999 in the four largest euroarea countries have been slightly more favourable than those gauged by the current measures. However, the competitiveness gap in 2014 vis-à-vis Germany remained unchanged in Italy and Spain, while it increased marginally in France. The cumulative trend for 1999-2014 in France, Germany and Spain was more favourable vis-à-vis euro-area countries than with respect to the others; no significant difference was recorded in Italy.